The introduction to the book describes the main claims in Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire. Readers are introduced to major terms in the book, including the military–theatrical complex, military–theatrical experiences, and the national–military phenomenon. The book’s arguments are discussed in the context of France’s evoling geopolitical goals from 1765 to 1794 and with the help of several critical approaches, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender Studies, and the cultural history of the French military. The end of the Introduction lays out the structure of the book and posits several key questions that the study hopes to answer.

Chapter 3 provides a critical reconstitution of pre-revolutionary military performance environments. First is a description of the development and operations of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, the only public theater that was built and financed by France’s war administration and where Joseph Patrat’s manipulated version of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Déserteur made its metropolitan French debut. The chapter’s second part focuses on the Comédie (Theater) in Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), the largest and most frequented theater in the colonial Caribbean. In addition to describing the military, racial, and gendered features of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue, this chapter connects Cap-Français’ Comédie, which was built in 1764 and which catered in part to the city’s large soldier population, to a network of military-infused theaters in French provincial cities such as Metz, Besançon, Lille, Perpignan, and Brest.

One of the leitmotifs of W.G. Sebald’s work is his idiosyncratic appropriation of the term Naturgeschichte (natural history). This essay explores the different intellectual traditions from which he borrows to mould this vital subtext. These range from the cultural practice of embedding scientific observations in narratives, evolutionary history, and the entropic cosmology of modern physics to the use of Naturgeschichte in critical theory, the German-Jewish tradition of reflecting on creaturely life, and the perception of warfare as a ‘natural history of destruction’. This overview of Sebald’s diverging concepts of natural history highlights some of the limitations and contradictions inherent in their eclectic narrative employment in works such as After Nature, The Rings of Saturn, A Place in the Country, The Natural History of Destruction, and the abandoned Corsica Project. In so doing, however, evidence is marshalled for the argument that it is precisely this syncretism that allows Sebald to explore the human condition in the Anthropocene, which is marked by the gradual replacement of the biosphere through the technosphere.